Wallpaper and Flooring

I thought I had a putty knife in the car when I went to scrape the backing off the entryway walls. Alas, I was mistaken. However, I discovered that the car's ice scrapers work well.



Now I just need a final wipedown to remove any gluey residue and I'm ready to patch the rough spots.

Tom and I spent the last bit of New Year's weekend testing two different makes of floor tile. Both are porcelain and mimic the look of natural stone, but they are from different manufacturers and have different colors.

(Great googly moogly, boxes of tiles are heavy! Remember to lift with your legs, folks! And don't be afraid to use several shopping carts at once-- I may have broken out the sides of the single shopping cart I used. )

Because we did not have enough of each make of tile to totally cover all the to-be-tiled area, we laid out all we had of one make, photographed it, then moved it to another area. It took a long time, and as the sun moved through the sky the lighting changed. So the comparison isn't perfectly equal from one make to the other...but it will have to be close enough.





It is so hard to decide which to go with! They are both beautiful, and cost the same.





I'll pick one, then the next day change my mind! Argh!





In other news, our favored contractor for the flooring is very slow getting back to us with estimates. But he says he can start January 9 and finish quickly, so I keep leaving him voice mail. I wonder if he doesn't really want our work, or maybe he's just crazy-busy.

The Kitchen Walls

This is what the "breakfast nook" looked like before and after I stripped off the wallpaper (also before it snowed).

I learned that I should not have used a razor blade to scrape the wallpaper off the wall. Doing so engraved some gouges into the wall that I will have to fill and sand before painting. Next time I will use a less-potentially-wall-damaging putty knife.